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The Joyful Life

I believe there is a small inkling of a higher way which
most ignore when thinking of ‘the good life.’
Most assume that life is a strict progression of choice to consequence,
but within the area of Christian thinking, there is the extra dimension of the
spiritual realm. This is the dimension
of the unseen, and it is the unseen rather than what can be seen, which is
capable of making life “good.” Because God is my unseen source, life can be not
only “good,” it can be better. I call this better life: joyful.

What does
it mean to be joyful, exactly? To
understand joy, first we have to understand happiness. People often mistake happiness for joy. The difference between happiness and joy is
that happiness is an emotion: a temporary feeling of euphoria or delight, while
joy is a decision to delight in one’s current situation regardless of whether
they feel happy, assuming joy is preferable to happiness. Without some sort of outside source of
delight, finding joy in life at any time is quite hard. Because I have God as my source, I always
have the ability to draw delight from him and from being with him. I can choose to delight in God; this allows
me to experience joy regardless of my
current situation.

Choosing
joy over happiness is a major tripping point.
We find happiness all around us.
We can delight in nature, in people, in companionship. The key for the Christian mind is to remember
that human-created happiness or “good,” cannot compare with God-given happiness
or “good.” Human-created good cannot
fill up empty hearts with any lasting joy or fulfillment. It is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in
one’s soul which fills us up with joy.
The mind chooses to accept the Spirit, and the heart learns to love
it. With the Spirit inside us, finding
joy in life is truly possible.

I have the
Spirit inside me, so I can find joy.
Where do I find it? I have found
it in the complexity of God’s creation.
There is joy in chasing sunsets, dancing in the rain, staring at stars,
laughing until you collapse – I see God in these things, and take delight in
them. There is joy to be gained from
gazing at intense beauty. Beauty springs
from sunsets, from rain showers, from the heavens, and I revel in it. God shows me beauty in so many ordinary
things, and in extraordinary things. My
favorite source of joy is the beauty I see in other people. This beauty is not just because of their
physical features, or even in their character, or the way they act. It is the deepest, rarest, most precious
beauty of the inmost parts of the soul, and I get to see it.

God has
blessed me with this amazing gift. He
shows me the beauty of others and puts words in my mouth to tell them about
it. When you search another’s soul, the
very core of their being, it is an incredible experience; I am filled with
joy. Beauty, potential, fire, passion –
all these I see in others and it inspires joy.
Since God has blessed me with the gift for blessing others, I have an
infinite well of joy to draw from. These
are the moments when I truly see how God has made my life good. Furthermore, he has made it full of joy.

To dive
even deeper, I would say that using the gifts God has given me not only fills
me with joy, but it is an act of worship.
I have been finding recently that I keep worshipping accidentally. I will come out of a train of thoughts and
find that my heart is overflowing with emotion; something inside me will be
trembling. Somehow, after all my frustrations
and problems have been thoroughly dissected and stomped upon, I realized God
was with me, right there, in that moment.
I was upset, and then I was worshipping.
Then I was in awe.

I think
that was worship right there. Oh
God! Life doesn’t have to be “good” if I
can find worship in words and blessing in bowing. Life with him is more than good. It is
joyful, and that is really all that I can say.

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I am a writer. The best word to describe me might be impulsive. I'm a talkative introvert who loves people even though they scare me. My idiosyncrasies include but are not limited to: talking to invisible characters, roleplaying my own stories as a form of editing, listen to music in a language I don't understand, drinking coffee late at night, waxing poetic about pretty much anything, and never reading or writing one thing at a time.